Burying Blair: Post-Mortem for the British
PM by Mike Whitney
www.dissidentvoice.org
August 1, 2005

No
one was the least bit surprised when Tony Blair announced that the only
antidote for the bombing attacks on the London subway was a fresh batch of
regressive laws. Blair is a master at turning tragedy into political
capital and the slaughter of 50 Londoners was no different. It only
sharpened his appetite for carrying out the directives of his paymasters
by further savaging civil liberties.

It always astonishes
how quickly the demagogues in Washington and London swing into action when
there’s a chance to hack away at personal freedom. They seem to operate on
the theory that people will only be safe when the country assumes the same
standards of justice as, let’s say, Egypt or Saudi Arabia.

Isn’t this where
Blair is pointing England?

And, wasn’t it
convenient that Blair just happened to have a whole raft of police-state
legislation ready to go just when the bombs went off? Maybe Tony is
hiding a crystal ball somewhere that he hasn’t told us about. Or, maybe
he’s taken to reading the entrails of dead animals to foresee the future?
Or, maybe Blair knew that London might be attacked and was warned two days
before the bombings, as was reported by the Stratfor Intelligence Agency?
Would anyone doubt that the dissembling PM who dragged his country to war
on false pretenses might look at terrorism as a way to boost his flagging
popularity in the polls?

Of course, not.

But, then, why
should British citizens sacrifice their “inalienable” rights because the
petulant Blair stormed off to war on a “pack of lies”? According to a
recent poll, 85% of the Brits believe that the bombings were directly
connected to Blair’s illegal involvement in Iraq. This has since been
confirmed by terrorist experts and Blair’s own M15 who just days ago
admitted that, “Iraq is a dominant issue for a range of extremist groups
and individuals in the UK and Europe.” In other words, there is a straight
line between the bloodletting in Baghdad and the bombs in London.

As John Pilger
astutely noted: “Those
were Blair’s bombs” on the London tube. And, it’s Blair who should be
hauled from his bunker at 12 Downing Street and frog-marched to the
gallows.

The fatuous Prime
Minister is obfuscating once again, trying to fend off the accusations
that he willingly put England on the firing line by joining Bush’s Middle
East crusade. The point is no longer even arguable; the attacks were the
direct “blowback” from the orgy of slaughter in Iraq.

Nevertheless, the
beleaguered Prime Minister won’t abandon his fractured rationale for the
hostilities, so he’s adopted an even more shrill tone towards terrorism.

“There is no
justification for it, period,” Blair opined. “And we will start to beat
this when we stand up and confront the ideology of this evil. Not just the
methods but the ideas. …We are not having any of this nonsense about it is
to do with what the British are doing in Iraq or Afghanistan, or support
for Israel, or support for America, or any of the rest of it.' It is
nonsense, and we have got to confront it as that. And, then we will start
to beat it...”

Blair’s raving is
part of a broader strategy to dismiss the obvious facts about terror and
blame the victims of American-British aggression. It’s a tactic that was
minted in Tel Aviv and perfected over 37 years of occupation. Now it’s
been exported to Washington and London with equal success. It is
predicated on the assumption that terrorism emerges from an amorphous,
religious-based ideology that transforms its adherents into ruthless
butchers.

It’s rubbish, and
the theory has been convincingly discredited by the analysis of Robert
Pape who has investigated nearly every suicide bombing from 1995 on. Pape
has proved conclusively that terrorism is inextricably linked to
occupation, not religious ideology. Blair’s blather is just more of the
same absurd speculation meant to justify the continuing butchery in Iraq
and keep his miserable career out of the political dumpster.

Predictably, Blair
now has many admirers in Israel. In the hard-right Jerusalem Post
Blair’s conversion is seen as a “wake up call” reminiscent of Bush at
9-11. As the strident David Horowitz notes, “Prime Minister Tony Blair
made plain this week, that terrorism is terrorism is terrorism.”

How can one hope to
dispute such keen insight, such unimpeachable acuity?

No wonder Horowitz
is doing celebratory cartwheels now that Bush and Blair have joined
Israel’s quest to slay the apocryphal dragon of “Islamo-fascism”. Never
mind that the whole theory is a hopeless fraud cooked up in an Israeli
think tank; never mind that it pits three of the world’s nuclear powers
against one and a half billion Muslims in a desperate, racist war.

“We shouldn't even
allow them the vestige of an excuse for what they do,” Blair boomed. “What
is happening in Iraq is that ordinary, decent Iraqis are being butchered
by these people with the same terrorist ideology that is killing people in
different parts of the world.”

Really? How odd that
the rest of the world sees it as the predictable reaction to a barbarous
occupation.

But, such feigned
sincerity is par for the course for the British Prime Minister. Blair
spends most of his waking hours gadding about in front of the camera lens
trying to affect the appearance of genuine sincerity. He is the consummate
political poseur: always ready to wrap himself in the Union Jack, assume a
Churchillian pose and rattle-off some patriotic claptrap about battling
evil.

Is it any wonder
that according to the Pakistan Daily Times he spends twice as much
as the average British woman on “make-up and skincare products” to
maintain his “famous all-year healthy glow”?

Unbelievable.

Blair has spent the
better part of the last five years affixed to Bush like a tick on a rhino,
riding piggyback on the coattails of his Crawford twin. He’s even taken on
the apocalyptic lingo of his mentor, braying about “evil ideology” and the
“defense of civilization.” Imitation may be the highest form of flattery,
but in Blair’s case it just reinforces the allegations that he’s a hapless
poodle devoid of personal resolve or inner fortitude.

Blair is worse than
Bush: a fatuous charlatan who’s undergone so many political
transformations, he’s like a withered starlet awaiting her Hollywood
comeback. He started out with lofty intentions and grand ideals and was
quickly swallowed up by compromise, corruption and an all-consuming
vanity. He’s become a tattered coat on a stick flailing away at the ether
to no affect; an empty gourd of a man; pallid and soulless; buffeted about
by every political headwind.